[R-SIG-Finance] Simple portfolio management - anything in R?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   Really unformed question here. Sorry about that but I'm just poking
around looking for answers/ideas. Thanks in advance.

   In the last year I've put some money in some a few managed accounts
for long term investing. Current these accounts hold 70-80 different
stocks & ETFs. While the investments themselves are going OK I'm not
very happy with the information the brokers give me in terms of how
the portfolios are doing against their respective benchmarks. To that
end I'm starting looking around for how I could get a little better
view.

   In the 1980s I suppose I might have been doing a very simple
version of this in Quicken, but that program seems quite disliked by
people who buy it on Amazon. Additionally, I'm Linux-based and find it
distasteful to spend money on M$ Windows apps VM unless they are
really good at what they do.

   I suspect the professional folks use tools that the rest of us
never will. Things from Bloomberg or the like. There's also a lot of
online portfolio trackers. Maybe one of them is actually good but I
haven't found it yet and I'm reticent to put too much private info on
yet another web site.

   This whole area seems like a natural for something done in R. Maybe
keep the trades in an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file and then load them
into R, get data from Yahoo, create graphs, do correlations, etc.

   Does anything like this exist? Or am I wrong headed and there's a
better way to do this?

   I'm not thinking of much more than an account balance, trade info -
date, number of shares, prices, etc., and then aggregate the results
into a few numbers for the portfolio.

   Comments?

Thanks,
Mark